Way of work

Just as is the case with many other swedish folk musicians, my repertoire consists mainly of polskas. I understood quite early that there is a connection between the word polska and the country of Poland, but how about the connection between ”my” tunes and the folk music and dances of today’s Poland?

This kind of connection is what we wanted to look for in our common project. We participate in our capacity as musicians and dancers and our point of departure is exclusively artistic – we have no scientific ambitions. Our point of departure is pleasure and curiosity and a desire to share our music and dance.

Our way of work was based on an intuitive and associative search. This intuitive and associative search was conducted in such a way that someone would play a tune or sing a song that this person particularly liked, or else they would present an old tune from music. After that any of us would follow his/her associations and play a tune or sing a song from his/her own repertoire or from music. In this way chains of tunes were created, some of them short, others longer. It was all done in a free and easy way, with pleasure. The connections between the tunes are various: some of them have a similar melody, in long segments or just in a short fragment, sometimes there is a familiar rhythm – some kind of groove or pulse or some rhythmical phrases. There may also be some kind of tonality, a pattern of intonations or even something much more ephemeric and hard to grasp, like a feeling, a sound or a mental image flashing through the mind. There may also be connections between Swedish and Polish dances when it comes to steps, formations, springiness etc. There were no rules and no explanations were demanded – those chains would have their own logic.

After the ”collection work”, which was full of pleasure, there followed a more arduous phase of editing – we had concerts to play and a cd to record. The result is what you now hold in your hands.